OpenBSD 5.6 is of course the first OpenBSD release with
LibreSSL, the now-famous fork of the OpenSSL
library. But while LibreSSL is an important milestone for OpenBSD, there
are many other things in the OpenBSD 5.6 release that warrant attention as
well.

The developers are still busy preparing the OpenBSD 5.6 release notes.
Meanwhile, if you’re curious
about what’s new in OpenBSD 5.6, you can get a sneak peek from
various places on the Internet if you know where to look! I would like
to highlight three places in particular.

plus56.html

The first place to look at is the big list of changes between OpenBSD 5.5 and 5.6
that has been painstakingly compiled by Brett Mahar (brett@) throughout
the development cycle. I think Brett does an amazing job of collating
all this information together for every release! I have no idea how he
manages to go through every source-changes@ post to produce this list so
consistently. :)

Hackathon reports

The second place that you can look at are the hackathon reports written
by the developers. Two hackathons
were held between OpenBSD 5.5 and 5.6: m2k14 in Marrakech, Morocco
(April 17-22, 2014) and g2k14 in Ljubljana, Slovenia (July 8-14, 2014).

g2k14 hackathon reports

Slides and papers

The third place to look at are the slides and papers written by OpenBSD
developers. Two notable events that took place between OpenBSD 5.5 and 5.6
are BSDCan 2014 and
EuroBSDCon 2014. You can check out
OpenBSD-related slides and papers for these events and more at: